Museum of `Arte Útil´ as a Useful Institution. A democratic (?) Exhibiton Space

Concentrating on the idea of `museum as a forum of possibilities´, Museum of `Arte Útil´ as a Useful Institution. A democratic (?) Exhibiton Space focuses on the analyses of Museum of Arte Útil, which was an exhibition held until the 30th of March 2014 in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (Netherlands). Through examining a concrete institutional model that wanted to adopt counter-institutional ethos, this research aimed to answer this main question: what does it mean for the Van Abbemuseum to internalize and commit with research-based projects such as Museum of Arte Útil to critically -and experimentally- find new ways of working with artists, with the public and on its own? This research study, therefore, questioned the efficiency of a concrete institutional project in which the norms of an `aesthetic experience´ were forced to undergo a process of renegotiation. Here, the consequences of creating a `democratic space for encounter´, in an art institution, were analysed by importing terms of political philosophy, which furthermore wanted to propose the inadequacy of a positivist sociological approach when analysing these kinds of practices.